The Business Model in Practice and its Implications for Entrepreneurship Research

Abstract

While the term “business model” has gained widespread use in the practice community, the academic literature on this topic is fragmented and confounded by inconsistent definitions and construct boundaries. In this study, we review prior research and reframe the business model with an entrepreneurial lens. We report on a discourse analysis of 151 surveys of practicing managers to better understand their conceptualization of a business model. We find that the underlying dimensions of the business model are resource structure, transactive structure, and value structure, and discuss the nature and implications of dimensional dominance for firm characteristics and behavior. These findings provide new directions for theory development and empirical studies in entrepreneurship by linking the business model to entrepreneurial cognition, opportunity co–creation, and organizational outcomes.